Oil on top of corn in Mexico

Taco? Enchilada? Just the thing for that al fresco summer lunch by the pool. Easy to prepare: just wrap some tasty goodies up in a tortilla, add chilli and you’re done. Mexicans have done this for hundreds of years and exported the delicious cuisine to the world. This year it may not be so easy. The corn price, in Mexican pesos, has doubled over the past six months and is back to the peaks of the boom before Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. Although population growth has slowed sharply, at over 110m (second only to Brazil in Latin America) there are still lots of Mexican mouths to feed. White corn is the base for tortillas and corn imports have doubled over the past decade to around 8mt per annum, leaving Mexico vulnerable to the vagaries of the world price. Mexico is also a big producer of oil but supply has declined from 3.4mbpd to 2.8mbpd over the past six years. It is also consuming increasing amounts of its own oil, now at 70% of output, and at the current rate will cease to be an exporter in this decade. Mexico has hamstrung itself by prohibiting foreign participation in oil exploration with the state-owned oil company, Pemex. Legislation has recently changed here but it will be many years before new production comes on stream from what is hoped are significant potential finds offshore. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is also likely to raise the cost of development. (See link to this on http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=133567). The QSL is from XERMX Radio Mexico International heard on shortwave (9705kHz in the 31 mb) in London in 1999. I also have a few Mexican AM station QSLs which I'll post in due course.